Many people judge the start of summer as being the point at which they smell the first barbeque of the season and it struck me that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors might have felt the same.
Living in a one-roomed dwelling, with the fire at its centre and the smoke escaping through a hole in the thatched roof above, our ancestors couldn’t wait to be able to light a fire outside as soon as the weather allowed.
We tend to think of meals in Britain as being centred around meat, but roasting a large carcass was in fact relatively rare for the peasant classes. The elite would hunt larger animals such as deer or wild boar, but when the peasants ate meat, it was usually small birds or perhaps a hedgehog, badger or squirrel. The fasting days stipulated by the church ruled out meat consumption for around two-thirds of the year, but this didn’t make much difference to the majority of people as the bulk of a peasant’s calories came from bread.
Bread
Women were the cooks in the home except in rich households where the cooking would be done by men. The Old English word for cook is coc which is a masculine noun, but there are masculine and feminine nouns for the word “baker”. If the village was important, it would have a communal oven, but in most cases the bread would be baked on a flat iron placed over the fire. Peasant bread was made from maslin flour, which is a mixture of wheat and rye, the cereals being grown together. The grain was milled with a hand quern unless there was a watermill nearby. The first watermill in Britain was in 762 but they quickly proliferated so that by the Domesday Book in 1086 there were 5624. The mill belonged to the landlord, being on the manor’s land, and so a proportion of the grain was taken as a toll. A similar levy applied to the communal bread oven, so both home milling and home baking continued for many. The unleavened therf-bread (hearthbread) was placed on the round flat iron which was attached to a long wooden handle (like a pizza paddle). The bread needed to be thick enough at the side that it could be held (like a plate). The bread would hold the daily pottage (stew-like soup) heaped up in the centre.
Other than bread, most of the cooking was done in one pot, an iron cauldron suspended over the fire. The contents of the daily pottage naturally varied with the seasons, it might include some salt pork, and dried beans, but plants from the wild were central to the life and vigour of Anglo-Saxon culture and these would be gathered daily.
Health
The Saxons possessed a formidable knowledge of herbs and their effect on the metabolism of humans and animals. The Leech Book of Bald, which dates from around 900-950, is considered to display a much wider knowledge of herbs than the doctors of Salerno. This book, the first medical treatise written in Western Europe after those in the ancient world, was a manual of a Saxon doctor.
Leechdoms (extracts from The Leech Book, essentially herbal remedies) gave precise instructions for drying foods in the sun and open air, or by the fire, or in the oven and kiln. Dried food was relied upon greatly especially herbs, mushrooms, seaweed, peas, beans, nuts and fruit. These might be stored in earthen pots.
Most of the writing about food during this time related to its health-giving properties. The average life expectancy was only 30 years. Under the Romans the population reached almost 5 million but had reduced to barely 2 million by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086. Famines were a regular occurrence, inevitably followed by plague or pestilence. The tenth century was full of weather-related catastrophes and some of the most notable years for famine and deaths were 1044, 1051,1068, 1086 and 1093.
Today, I usually feel that there is a greater adherence to health doctrines abroad, particularly in Italy, than there is here. Then again, when I look at the vast choice of herbal teas available in my local health food shop, I recognise that the legacy of our ancestors herbal knowledge remains very much alive.
Agriculture
The Open Field system introduced by the Saxons was a response to villagers demands for a fair system for apportioning the land for cultivation. Each family was allocated a “hide” (probably about 120 acres) but in return they had to pay a food rent to the King (in addition to what they also paid to the church and the Lord of the Manor).
Over time this fair system began to change as the lords took more and more of the land, often given in return for their military duties to the King, increasing the food rent a farmer had to pay. If they were unable to meet their obligation, they lost their freedom and were bound to serve on the lord’s land as well as their own, becoming in effect serfs. Under the lord’s protection were the freemen and various classes of unfree men who were tenants on the land, and below these the serfs, who were attached to the household of the lord. Then there were slaves – captives taken in war or children of poor families who chose selling their children into slavery as a preferable option. However, all classes of community had a homestead and land around it where a fenced kitchen garden grew, although the size of both dwelling and land grew progressively smaller the lower the rank.
Arable lands around the villages were divided into three, two were cultivated (one cereals, one peas and beans) whilst the third was left fallow. All the land was fertilized by livestock in the winter months. The whole area was divided into long, narrow strips, a furrow long – hence furlong, which is forty poles in length, and four poles breadth giving an acre in total. The strips were scattered across the whole area so that the advantages and disadvantages of soil and topography were shared. Villagers also retained a share in the meadows and were allowed to pasture their animals on common land and had rights of wood-cutting on waste lands. How well the system worked was completely dependent on the nature of the lord of the manor and the church but was less abused in the Saxon era than it was to become under the Normans.
Fruit
Although the Romans had introduced new fruits to this country, together with cultivation techniques such as grafting, their villas were destroyed by the invaders that soon followed the Roman withdrawal. The skills survived in our monasteries, but fruit cultivation was to continue to be the preserve of the elite for many more centuries. The majority continued to gather their fruit in the wild up until just 300 years ago.
All manner of wild berries were gathered including blackberries, bilberries, raspberries and strawberries plus cherries and plums. Piled onto their bread trencher, the juice of the wild fruit soaked into the bread giving us the original summer pudding.
The berries and fruits mentioned above could all be eaten raw but there were many more that required preparation such as bletting to soften, or drying to ameliorate the astringency. They would then require cooking.
Crab Apples
We know that apples were revered long before they were cultivated. Few of us now make use of those crab apples, which incidentally, are not the fruit that now goes by that name, and which are grown in some gardens, both ornamentally and to make jelly. The true crab apple is densely packed, of both branches and fruit. The apples are small, green ripening to yellow, and fall in November. Even when they fall, they are still very hard and would have been very difficult to grind by hand. They are also very sour, which helps them keep for a long time, so gathering the fallers could provide a supply for a couple of months. Grinding and/or pressing them is what is required to release their sour juice, which was used by the Romans to make verjuice, a slightly fermented vinegar that served in the place of the lemons the Romans knew. Verjuice continued to be made in Britain for centuries until lemons became widely available. Crab apple trees proved excellent rootstock on which the Romans grafted their sweet apples, and they continued to fulfil this role in the future so that all of the cultivated apples we now enjoy contain their ancestry. For medicinal purposes, crab apples were used to relieve constipation.
However, even these myriad uses don’t seem to justify the regard in which apples have always been held: they were part of the Celtic celebrations of Samhain, and strongly associated with fortune telling and fertility. They were also used decoratively, for example hung to make a Kissing Bough. The Pagan ritual of wassailing, which aims to ensure the trees would awake again from their winter sleep, gets its name from the Anglo-Saxon waes and hael meaning be of good health.
We do know that in the royal court and other wealthy households fruit sauces were being served with meat in this period. They were probably making these with cultivated fruit, but it seems credible to me that peasant households, with just a single pot to cook in, may well have cooked crab apples or other fruit along with their pottage and, once the apples had softened, removed the flesh to serve alongside their meal. Whether the meal contained meat or not is another question. What is certain is that given our climate a lot of the wild fruit would have needed cooking before eating. Furthermore, honey, the only source of sugar, would have been in very limited supply, so that eating fruit as a savoury accompaniment would have been a logical move. Until the last few decades, we have seemed to prefer to eat fruit cooked rather than raw as we are the only country to have actively bred apples specifically for cooking. Another legacy from peasant cooking perhaps?
Dried fruit is another legacy of this time, particularly in the context of baking. It began being included in bread doughs, probably first in the monasteries, to celebrate religious festivals.
Pears
Although of lesser importance than apples, the regard for pears is evident from the place names in the Domesday Book that derive from the Old English words “pere” “peru” (pear) and “peridge” (pear tree). There are Perrys in Kent, Somerset and Worcestershire, Purton in Gloucestershire, Perton near Wolverhampton, and Pirie (now Paulerspury) in Northamptonshire.
Pear trees are known for their longevity and for growing tall and straight, so they were grown more for these qualities than for their crop. They were often planted as boundary markers, and this would explain why the word pear was included in the place name. An example can be seen at St Mary’s church in Limpley Stoke, near Bath, the only survivor of seven “pear churches”. Built in 1001 AD, a pear tree already stood as a boundary marker for the lands gifted by the Abbess of Shaftesbury.
Pears were cultivated within the monasteries, but these were cooking pears, and the first of note, the Warden pear, was named after Warden Abbey, which was not founded in 1136.
Fruit expert Joan Morgan writes that “Most wild pears, whether Pyrus communis or other species, were very sharp to eat but drying them softened the harsh astringency and they could be stored.”
Wild pears are now very rare, but I planted one in an edible hedgerow. The fruits are very small, barely noticeable.
Wild Service
Sorbus torminalis is native of ancient woodland although rarely found today. A spindly tree with a pretty maple like leaf and small white scented flowers in June, it is one of our native species likely to be endangered by climate change. The hard little fruits in autumn are mottled, or chequered, giving rise to the alternate name of chequer berries, which have provided food and drink since neolithic times. The fruit must be left to “blet”, like medlars, before it can be used and in future times would be added to sweeten beer, hence the number of pubs called The Chequers. Marwood Yeatman describes the taste as exotic and the texture as gritty. Even without the help of other alcohol the fruits can, apparently, make a “destabilisingly strong alcoholic punch”. Medicinally, John Evely says it is good for digestion and a safeguard against colic and dysentery.
Drink
In Anglo-Saxon times peasants drank ale, brewed from barley, and there is no record of them using these skills to make drink from fruit, although that would become, in the not-too-distant future, an enduring aspect of our food culture.
The elite drank wine and the Domesday Book in lists eight vineyards in Somerset, the earliest in Mere, granted to Glastonbury by King Edwy (Alfred’s grandson), who came to the throne in 955. The Domesday Book also lists 30 vineyards in the south of England – the monastery at Ely was so rich in them that it was known as the Isle des Vignes. Vineyards often had orchards alongside although there are only a couple mentioned in the Domesday Book and so the assumption is that orchards were still few and mainly limited to monasteries or manor houses. The fruits of monastery orchards included plums, pears, medlars, quinces, mulberries and walnuts (improved under the Romans by grafting).
The one wild fruit that is still widely gathered is the blackberry and this year they have ripened earlier than ever. Please give a thought to our Anglo-Saxon heritage as you pick them this year!
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